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Concerto in D

Introduction

Also known as the ‘Basle Concerto‘, the Concerto in D was commissioned for the Basel Chamber Orchestra (Basler Kammerorchester) in 1946 by Paul Sacher, the conductor of the ensemble. Sacher was not only an advocate of Stravinsky during the composer’s lifetime, but in the 1980s he established the Sacher Stiftung in Basel, where the vast majority of the composer’s archives are now held. This elegant string concerto was written at a time when Stravinsky was acclimatizing to Los Angeles and the dizzyingly popular musical styles to which he was constantly exposed. As a result, the composer dabbled in film music, wrote ballet music for a Broadway revue, and completed a work in the jazz idiom, the ‘Ebony Concerto‘ for Woody Herman, written just before the ‘Basle Concerto‘.

Scored for the full complement of strings, the Concerto in D fully explores the richness of a full-blooded string ensemble in much the same way as his earlier Concerto ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ (1937–8) exploited the opportunities afforded by a chamber orchestra for both strings and winds. The ‘Basle Concerto‘’s string writing runs the gamut of special techniques including cleverly employed spiccato and pizzicato writing often juxtaposed with beautifully lyrical writing assigned to various parts of the orchestra. The Concerto is cast in three movements and displays neoclassical writing at its cleanest—unadorned and alternately gritty and graceful without artifice. The jutting silences and syncopations obvious throughout the first movement, for example, are characteristically Stravinskian in the way they energize the music’s flow. The second and third movements reveal a composer still committed to the ‘tension and release’ formula of tonality but increasingly allowing prolonged dissonances to stand on their own without immediate resolutions. The work was composed entirely in Hollywood shortly before Stravinsky undertook his landmark ballet Orpheus, also notable for its luminous string writing.

Recordings

A new album from the Gramophone Award-winning team of Steven Osborne, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. Here they present Stravinsky’s music for piano & orchestra as a rare complete set, plus the Concerto in D for string orchest ...» More